The News & Observer ran a story this weekend about an online petition hosted by Sen. Phil Berger that includes claims about health reform that national health law expert Mark Hall labeled “absurd lies”. WRAL also covered the petition in an online story.

Please help me stop Obamacare in North Carolina. We already passed a bill in the Senate that protects us from:

Apparently Speaker Tillis and the Governor did not like being called out in Berger’s original petition. So, he kindly removed that language while keeping the “absurd lies”. That’s important because outright deception is not that common among politicians. It is true that many elected officials engage in some serious spin. But there is no nugget of truth to the claim that health records will be turned over to the IRS. I don’t think any person who wants to be taken seriously would claim that the form going to the IRS counts as a health record.

Why not just debate health reform on its merits? This sort of misrepresentation doesn’t help anyone.